From National Geographic

Week before last, temperatures in International Falls Minnesota reached 46 degrees below zero and that was the air temperature, without the windchill.  An Arctic blast of cold air broke free from its northern moorings and spread rapidly into Minnesota and nearby states. At those temperatures, breathing through your nose is a challenge, as ice crystals form within the nasal cavity and you quickly find it best to breathe through a scarf or some other device, like a face mask that quickly gets warmed by your breath. But in time, even these filters develop ice crystals and breathing through them can become more labored. Most Minnesotans know what to do under these conditions–they go outside only when they have to and spend more time indoors. Air hockey anyone?

All humans share a short nasal cavity; sufficient time has not elapsed to see if evolutionary adaptations might arise in Minnesotans, such as a longer nasal cavity that would serve to mitigate nasal ice crystal formation.  In response to this dry arctic air that crept into Minnesota week before last, I found myself shuttered inside, thinking about polar bears and the special adaptive features they have developed to make it through winters that actually don’t get a lot colder than what we observed recently in Minnesota (January temperatures in the Arctic get to about 58 degrees below zero, so we truly got a blast of real Arctic air), though they stay that way much longer. Polar bears are insulated by about 4 inches of blubber, lying immediately underneath their skin. They also have a larger head and a longer nasal cavity when compared to Brown bears. The longer nasal cavity is probably better at warming the cold air when breathing through the nostrils and polar bears have an olfactory apparatus that can detect minute odor levels miles away.  You have heard of the infrared cameras that one uses to gauge heat loss and identify areas in your home that are losing heat through poor insulation. Well, the polar bear is so well insulated that they are virtually invisible to an infrared camera. They are one of the most efficient animals for heat retention we know of.

Polar bears are the largest land-dwelling carnivores, with males reaching up to 1500 pounds; the largest polar bear on record weighed 2210 pounds. Yet, while they are the dominant predator of the Arctic circle, they are slated for extinction perhaps within the next 50 years. A guaranteed disappearance of a predator at the top of the food chain should bother the Hell of out of all of us, because we are predators at the top the biggest and widest food chain in the world. So if polar bears can disappear with the speed of essentially dimming a switch, why can’t this happen to us just as easily? Well of course, for one thing there are more of us–humans number more than 6 billion and by the middle of this century we are scheduled to reach 9 billion, while polar bears, restricted to the Arctic circle region, number about 20,000 to 25,000; their numbers are already declining while human numbers continue to grow. Then too, we occupy a different niche than polar bears and occupy more temperate zones and insure ourselves an adequate supply of food through agriculture and animal cultivation; most of us don’t have to hunt to eat. In contrast, the polar bears have an established a food chain niche that is critically dependent on the retention of sea ice for foraging. This projected elimination of the species is not because of threats from hunting or factors other than the expected conditions that will be brought about by global climate change and the early seasonal loss of sea ice that polar bears depend on for hunting their primary prey–seals. Persistent sea ice is essential for polar bears to hunt. Normally, the sea ice doesn’t break up until September, at which time polar bears are forced by circumstances to move off the sea ice onto land. In the fall, a pregnant female creates a hibernation den within the snow and enters into a state of semi-hibernation during which time, her cubs are born (2-4) and they feed exclusively on mother’s milk for three to four and a half months.

When a mother polar bear comes out of her winter hibernation, with cubs in tow, she will have lost several hundred of pounds of weight, as she had fattened up before hibernation in order to nurse her cubs that are born during the hibernation period. After the birth of the cubs, but still during the hibernation period, mother’s milk is the exclusive source of nourishment used to feed the cubs. So when she emerges with her cubs in the spring, they are old enough to have some mobility and her first need is to get food to nourish herself and keep producing mile to feed her cubs. It’s as if the termination of the hibernation period brings on a food crisis. Normally, when polar bears emerge from hibernation,  the arctic sea ice is still intact, which is far more conducive for catching seals, the main diet of polar bears.  Even when the sea ice begins to break up in the summer, large chunks of ice allow polar bears to hunt on the ice when seals break through their holes to breathe. But if the sea ice becomes too thin and breaks up into smaller chunks or disappears altogether, seals are no longer constrained to breathe through the ice and polar bears can no longer hunt efficiently.  There are reports of polar bears mating with grizzlies, the result of which is to produce hybrids that are less efficient as swimmers and at greater risk when marginal sea ice conditions appear.  So, the earlier that the sea ice melts or breaks up, the greater is the risk for polar bears. Reports of polar bear drownings have already appeared, presumably as a result of too much ice melting and making swimming distances between ice flows too great.

The story behind the threat of polar bear extinction began  in 2007 and was provided by a report from the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS), indicating that within 50 years, the shrinking sea ice will leave only a small remnant of polar bear populations on the islands of the Canadian Arctic; those along the Alaskan and Russian coasts, which are the populations most often studied, will all be gone. These reports were provided to Congress; a year later, the polar bear was listed as a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act by the United States Department of the Interior.

The report of 2007 made the news in the Anchorage Daily News (article written by  Tom Kizzia, September 8, 2007) and, until recently, nothing had changed to alter these grim projections, based on scientific expectations derived from climate change modeling studies, using what is known as a general circulation model (GCM). Those studies indicated that sufficient carbon dioxide had already accumulated such that a “tipping point” had been reached and nothing could be done to reverse the fate of sea ice in the Arctic as it was shrinking at a much faster rate than earlier models had predicted. In a relatively short time, it was predicted that sea ice would disappear and get broken up earlier and earlier in the year, putting more pressure on polar bears. In these studies, the tipping point concept was based on the idea that ice normally provides a reflection of sunlight and thus returns energy from the surface of the earth, preventing some solar radiation from warming the oceans and land surfaces. But as ice surfaces diminish in area, earth and water surfaces get more sunlight exposure. This phenomenon is referred to as the “albedo” effect; it constitutes a positive feedback from melting ice–the more ice that melts, the more sunlight hits the earth and water surfaces and in turn melts more ice. The ice melt of 2007 was especially worrisome. Thus, USGA report of 2007 suggested that this positive feedback system, had already reached a point that future sea ice would melt, perhaps very rapidly, and eliminate most of the polar bear population within 50 years. According to that report a tipping point had already been reached so that no matter what future reductions in carbon emissions might be achieved, the polar bears were doomed.

The 2007 USGA report was not seriously challenged until a recent article appeared in Nature in December 2010 (volume 468, p. 955-958). This report re-examined the idea of a tipping point for sea ice and the future of polar bears. However, in these new modeling studies, the issue was examined based on the assumption that some reduction in greenhouse gases would take place in the future. Using a similar model to that used to project a poor outcome for polar bears, the paper by Amstrup et al accepted different levels of reductions in green house gases as a basis for generating different models that simulated whether or not a normal  sea ice pattern could be retained under these conditions of reduced carbon dioxide emissions. Five different models of reduced carbon emissions were used, including one proposal to keep the carbon dioxide levels the same as those of the year 2000 (Y2K model); other models used different scenarios for reducing the level of carbon emissions. First, this study confirmed the 2007 USGA results, strongly supporting the idea that if nothing is done, most polar bears are either doomed or will have to dramatically change their hunting habits (and are probably poorly equipped to do so).  However, with reductions in atmospheric carbon dioxide, the Amstrup modeling studies showed that the sea ice could be retained sufficiently to give safe harbor for polar bears. They did not find a “tipping point” that doomed the polar bears and for that reason alone, the study was very encouraging and carried an obviously reduced doomsday prediction. The December 2010 study is exemplary for several reasons. In addition to giving new hope to the polar bears if humans begin to reduce carbon emissions, the Amstrup paper also demonstrates the power of the internet. In a high impact journal such as Nature, papers are given a relatively small amount of space for a single paper–typically three pages or less for an article. But, because information can be stored on the internet, referred to and linked/downloaded while reading the on-line paper, the so called supplemental material can increase the length of the paper by several fold. The polar bear paper referred to was less than three double-sided printed pages in the magazine, but the supplemental material, which contained additional information on the models used, including more color figures and references, was 26 double-sided pages. A second mode of expansion can be seen in the reference section, where if you click on the section, it expands so that each reference has a “show content” link that takes you to an expanded explanation of the reference that has been quoted, what the reference says and why it may or may not be a source of valid observations and conclusions. In short, the Nature paper just described shows why there are no short papers anymore, particularly on a complex subject and within a high impact journal. Now we have three different levels of readership. First, there’s the casual reader, trying to get the general concept of the article, then there’s the serious reader who evaluates the main figures and can talk somewhat intelligently about the article and then there are the global climate change people and serious polar bear biologists who scour through the main article, all the figures, the material in the supplemental section and the expansion of the references, a sort of “why did I use this reference” section. The take home message of all this complexity is that first and foremost, the best and worst case for the future of our polar bears are both based on models–that is all we have to go on. But, increasingly, the models are fed by better and better data and such models are trying to reach down and resolve time limits not achieved in previous work. Instead of centuries long outcomes, models are getting down to half-century and even decades of time. We will see some of these changes within a single human lifetime. But, a single year of weather means nothing–the variables making up our annual weather patterns are too great to project our future from the weather that unfolds in a single season, tempting though it may be to project them forward in time. I seriously doubt that humans have the capacity to remember and log the long-term weather patterns, such that we can become reliable reporters of weather patterns that change over decades: most of us can’t really remember with certainty the weather events of last year. We remember really tough winters and hot summers and there is a sense that we are moving towards warmer conditions, but these transitions are not smooth hyperbolic curves we ride on and that’s why, as much as we like to talk about the weather, we rely on measurements to reveal the true weather trends. Those measurements show, that as the carbon dioxide emissions have increased, the air temperatures are rising, our oceans are warming and expanding, the ice masses are receding and species are threatened. Globally, 25% of mammalian species are threatened with extinction. Habitat loss is the main reason and for the polar bears, the threat of loss of sea ice is also a case of habitat loss, even though it is first and foremost attributed to global climate change and humanoid activity.

RFM

So, if we wanted to conduct an experiment on the environmental impact of a major oil spill–now is our chance. But BP is attempting to silence the scientists who are examining the impact of the spill, as I wrote earlier. Whatever we have done to the ecology of the region will not be known for decades and many issues will probably never be fully understood. Right now, thanks to the use of Corexit, there is a layer of oil on the bottom of the Gulf, the magnitude and distribution of which is presently unknown: I seriously doubt there is any method that can measure it.  But that is the area where many fish breed (including some species of blue fin tuna), so the future of fish that spawn in the gulf is unknown and since the number of fish caught is rapidly diminishing world wide (virtually all Atlantic salmon that we buy in the store is farmed fish), it will be hard to pin any change in fish numbers on the Gulf oil spill of 2010.  Not entirely unrelated is how we destroyed the cod fishing in the North Atlantic: once fishing trawlers came along that could reach with their nets down to the bottom of the ocean, the cod started to disappear because that’s where the big cod go down to breed and where the newly hatched cod stay to grow. So, while cod was once considered to be an inexhaustible source of seafood, and built the early economy of New England, the major cod fisheries have been closed since the early 1990s. Will oil on the bottom of the gulf achieve what the trawlers did to the cod fishing industry in the Atlantic?   Williams’ article also reveals that many residents of the Gulf region have been tested for contamination and show up with elevated levels of benzene and cadmium. So, we haven’t just intoxicated the wild life of the region, we must also think about the long-term impact on humans. Williams adds another point that should spark instantaneous sobriety: the five million barrels of oil spilled into the gulf would have provided the United States with about four hours of our daily oil diet. It is government collusion with the oil industry that produces this kind of outcome, though many feel that BP is an outlier when it comes to safety issues. The PBS program FRONTLINE did a major documentary on the safety record of BP and its convoluted history. You can watch it here. I have also commented on BP and the Gulf oil spill in articles here and here.

Who can lead us out of this toxic quagmire of excessive, American-style capitalism that puts humans below profits and stock values over human safety and protection of the environment? It is as if our frontal lobes, the region of our brain where we stand the best chance of evoking some longitudinal thinking and perhaps realizing that we are on an unsustainable path–that region of the brain has died of the atrophy of disuse, especially by our government and its collusion with international corporate objectives. But, as the saying goes, “we have met the enemy and it is us.” If we demanded a change and forced refocus of our culture on a sustainable path, compatible with the environment and the other animals that live within it, we could change things beginning now. We are too late to avoid impact from global climate change and we are too late to avoid a rise in sea levels, but we are not too late to save the planet from an insurmountable catastrophe that lies in our path if we do nothing. If we should lose the Greenland, Antarctic and Arctic ice, the ocean levels will rise by about 70 meters, Florida will be completely underwater and the Mississippi River will drain into the Gulf at Tennessee. While the earlier projections did not foresee this kind of catastrophe during the 21st century, the ice is melting faster than we thought, by mechanisms we cannot yet model, nor do we understand. So, while it is still true that we control our own destiny, that is probably only true today for a subset of the global population. It doesn’t mean we can’t improve, but we are already late.

RFM

A recent  NYT article describes a possible major breakthrough in the disovering the etiology of CCD.  The Times article was based on an extensive study described in the on-line science journal Plos One (public access is available). The combined force of academic researchers and a group of army researchers studying proteomics, extensively analyzed  and compared stable, unstable and collapsed bee colonies. They used a very powerful method of mass-spectrometry based proteomics. With this approach, instead of looking for genomic evidence, they were able to analyze thousands of different proteins and infer back to identify the organisms that generated them. The field of proteomics has exploded in the last decade and is becoming an increasingly powerful way of looking at gene control through analysis of the proteins they generate. Although many pathogens have already been detected in bees and many were also discovered in the Plos One study, two different organisms seemed to consistently track one another and correlate best with CCD, including a large DNA virus, not described in bees previously, and referred to as the invertebrate iridescent virus (IIV; Iridoviridae); however samples also consistently contained a microsporidia Nosema apis (fungus); the co-localization of these two pathogens was more consistent with CCD than either one alone. Once a hive was infected, forager flights began to decline, as dead honey bee samples showed increasingly high peptide counts from the two pathogens. Using pathogen injections into single bees (see figure), they were able to show that bee toxicity was far more evident when both pathogens were injected as opposed to either one alone.

Injection of single bees

The take home message from this study is twofold: first MSP is a powerful tool for studying the pathogenic origins of bee infections and secondly, perhaps a dual infection with a previously unknown (in bees) large DNA virus (Iridoviridae) and a  fungal agent (Nosema apis) accounts for beehive collapse in America. The authors are quick to point out that  CCD in other countries may be attributed to different pathogens and that their analysis may only account for the problem in North America. It is still not clear whether the dual infection is the cause of CCD or whether it is a sign of imminent colony collapse, but the injection studies certainly point to these two pathogens as the cause rather than an indicator. The obvious question is that if the double pathogen theory is correct, how can CCD be treated and can beehives be restored to centers of industry and productivity? Many workers in the field seem to believe that treating the fungus may be the best approach, but as the graph shows, fungus control alone may not solve the entire problem. Iinjections with either pathogen reduced bee lifespan over controls. Perhaps on the way to recovering normal beehive function, we may have a period in which beehive lifespan is reduced, while still serving a pollinating function. The other possibility that is difficult to eliminate is that healthy bees can effectively fight off these infections, while bees that are environmentally intoxicated through other means cannot. Thus, one can ask whether CCD in North American bee colonies reflects the globalization of pathogen exposure or have these pathogens always been in the environment and now have opportune moments for bee infection, because their hosts decline in health through other mechanisms? Only time and a lot more research can answer these questions. The good thing about the Plos One report is that a new bee pathogen has been discovered and it may hold important clues to the future of pollination and the security of our own food supply.

Let’s see now, how would the free market  respond to the pollination problem we are facing in America? No, they would not invest in the development of electronic pollinators because the development time is too long (remember that the lifespan of a CEO is about five years, so investment must yield something substantial within that time frame).  Only the shaky and uncertain thrust of venture capitalism would respond with long-term investments and the hope of a payoff down the road. That sector of our financial repertoire  is about the only healthy element  that remains, but it is too small to be a broadly effective source of financing.  In the meantime, thank God we have a government who will support these studies, though I find it worrisome that a U.S. Army MSD apparatus was necessary, rather than having one available to the scientists on their own, together with the expertise required to run the machine and interpret the data. This is what happens when grants get cut to the bone and research is limited because of limited funding. I counted eighteen authors on the Plos One article and thirteen different institutional locations. A problem of the depth and magnitude of CCD can only be approached through highly collaborative scientific efforts.  CCD is truly one of the more profoundly disturbing components of our modern culture and, in my view,  should be ranked with global climate change as a looming threat for which we need to mobilize a strong research effort, preferably one that doesn’t require the American military. On the other hand this story represents a good union of vital resources and technologies that proved essential to unravel this part of what remains as a serious whodunit problem.

RFM

While it looks as though this salmon may soon be in the marketplace,  it is unclear whether the fish will be given special labeling indicative of its genetic makeup. While the public has not been in on the decision-making process during the approval  by the FDA, they will have an opportunity to evaluate the fish once it enters into the market place.  Although AquaBounty claims that these fish will help bring fish to market with fewer resources, it is not entirely clear in which way that works. A fish that gets larger, faster will require more food to get there, though the human effort in supplying that food will presumably be reduced, hence the savings.  But, will the genetically-altered salmon be as resistant to infection and parasitic disease compared to their normal genomic cousins? Only time will tell whether these changes are maladaptive when the entire panoply of generational  life’s experiences are taken into account. But the fact is that virtually all Atlantic salmon that we eat today come from commercial fish farms.

The FDA has already signed off on the idea that the animal has a stable genetic makeup  and that the fish are not harmed if you follow multiple generations. AquaBounty is expecting approval in the next few months to begin selling the eggs to fish farmers. What a super-voracious salmon will to do the environment is not clear.  AquaBounty has indicated that all of their fish will be grown in inland tanks, so that they cannot escape into the wild. This arrangement will be different from other commercial salmon fish farms that have their fish cages inserted into bays and inlets to take advantage of natural water conditions. Such arrangements have been criticized for the influence they have on normal migrating salmon and especially on the salmon fry that come back from fresh water hatching, heading for the sea. Such fry often get infested with parasites that flourish in the overcrowded fish farm cages as they pass through, often with a lethal outcome.

This is only the beginning of the brave new world of genetically modified commercial  farm animals. Look next for the “enviropig” which has been genetically modified to produce less phosphorus pollution in its manure.  The American public already seems to have accepted genetically modified plant food sources, while our European cousins remain skeptical.  It remains to be seen whether we will accept genetically modified meat sources; it appears that the AquaBounty salmon will be the first public test of the acceptability of such animals. Will they have less mercury? However, since it is possible that these fish will not be labeled to indicate their genetic status, we may never know from whence they came. That’s the way AquaBounty wants it and there are some indications that’s they way it will be.

RFM

Climatologists used to think that changes in the weather would only take place over hundreds if not thousands of years, because the atmosphere was perceived to be a large, gigantic carbon sink. But that has all changed and the contemporary view favors the potential for dramatic changes in climate that can take place  over decades or even in less time.  The delicate balance that we have taken for granted throughout the centuries of human history, has been significantly altered by our behavior, which has cumulatively started to change our environment, beginning with the industrial revolution. But those early, seemingly innocuous beginnings, are projected to reach peak levels of greenhouse gases during this century and eventually these new levels are projected to have a far more dramatic impact on our weather, even compared to the trends we have witnessed over the last few decades. Climatologists are confident that dramatic changes will begin to accelerate as the planet continues to warm and carbon dioxide levels continue to rise.   The Earth behaves like a blackbody source of radiation, in that it absorbs light energy from the Sun, whose wavelengths are generally short (in the visible wavelength spectrum and below (including ultraviolet light)) and then gives off energy at longer wavelengths, mostly in the infrared region, which is invisible to our eyes. In contrast however the Earth without an atmosphere loses sufficient heat through infrared radiation that, if that were the only thermal factor operating, it would leave our planet at temperatures well below freezing. It is the atmosphere that keeps absorbing and reflecting infrared radiation that is responsible for keeping our planet warm and, atmospheric carbon dioxide, though a small constituent of our atmosphere, has always played a major role in regulating our global climate.  Thus, the mean planetary temperature is created through the process of losing some heat through the atmosphere, while retaining some through heat capture and reflection; this dual process has served as the delicate balance by which we have faded into and out of warming and cooling cycles, including several ice-ages in our long geological history. While the causes of these past temperature fluctuations are still a matter of investigation and debate, scientists are in strong agreement that the carbon dioxide problem we face will dramatically change our weather, especially if we do nothing to control our carbon emissions.

The only way we can project our climate future is through computer models and base those models as rigorously as we can on data that we acquire through geological and other scientific disciplines. Today’s computer models are fairly sophisticated and have been gaining in precision and predictability as computer capabilities and measurement constraints have been slowly added to the modeling strategy. There is no other way. We are building these “General Circulation Models” and improving on them to make better predictions about our planetary future.  Initially, models and early studies tried to focus on why the Earth went through the dramatic temperature fluctuations that included several ice-age periods. Was this a normal cycling of the atmosphere and if so, why and how did our  weather change so drastically? But as the measurements and models got more sophisticated, climatologists, in collaboration with many other branches of science, including the biological and oceanic sciences, began to focus on a new problem, one that was increasingly created by man. This problem turned out to be not just an issue of greenhouse gases warming the Earth and the oceans, but also rising sea water levels that, in the near future, could threaten coastal cities and generate other, more dangerous possibilities created by alterations in the ocean currents that provide significant warm weather to Europe for example. In the latter case, models have demonstrated that that the Atlantic current that warms Europe, in which warm water travels north on the surface, as cold Arctic water travels in the opposite direction at deeper levels, could disappear in a relative heartbeat if the salinity of Arctic water goes down, as it might if significant melting in the region occurred. In an age of global warming, it seems counter-intuitive that Europe could get much colder, especially in the winter. But, not everyone is opposed to global climate change. Many Russians for example feel they would welcome a few degrees added to their winter. Then too excessive carbon dioxide can help support additional plant growth, but even this effect can turn negative if accompanied by excessive plant decay.

It was in 1938  that Stewart Callendar, standing in front of the Royal Meteorological Society in London,  first suggested that the planet was gradually warming and that the principal culprit was humans burning fossil fuels and adding tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Few other scientists accepted Callendar’s idea at the time, simply because it seemed irrational that the atmosphere was so delicate and limited that it couldn’t absorb the results of burning fossil fuels without a blip on the radar screen. Was planet Earth really that small? Earlier work by British scientist John Tyndall had determined that the main gases in the atmosphere, including nitrogen and oxygen, are transparent to infrared radiation, but “coal gas” was opaque to infrared rays, caused mostly by its high carbon dioxide content. In this way, atmospheric carbon dioxide became known as a “greenhouse gas.”

No teaching tool is quite like history for learning about the sea changes that shape politics and attitudes and the evolution of ideas, both scientific and otherwise. An excellent book that traces the history of global climate change is Spencer R. Weart’s “The Discovery of Global Warming“ Harvard Press, 2008. Weart has also created a site where a hypertext presentation and a summary of global climate change history and facts can be sorted out as a kind of short cut for reading the book.

From my perspective, the salient features of this story begin with the realization that scientists studying the global climate in the late 1970s had started to converge on the idea that Callendar was right: we faced a serious problem in the future with man-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which was carbon dioxide. But scientists alone cannot force changes in public policy and without some divine interference, scientists generally have a hard time getting attention to their concerns, unless there is a major catastrophe that requires their input for understanding (we can see the public beginning to turn to scientists for explanations as an aid in understanding the impact of the on-going BP Gulf oil spill).

In 1979, the influential National Academy of Sciences issued a report that gave increased visibility to the global warming concept by suggesting that doubling atmospheric carbon dioxide would bring an increase in global temperature of 1.5-4.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit), an alarming increase that could raise serious concerns about the safety of our planetary future. Unfortunately, in the U.S., just as scientific studies of the global climate were gaining momentum, the election of Ronald Reagan brought about a backlash and helped generate the Republican skepticism on global warming that is still with us (or them) today. About the time that Reagan was elected President, Greenland ice core studies revealed that drastic temperature changes had taken place in our history within the span of a century, suggesting that our climate is not an ultrastable, unmodifiable system at all, but may have a tendency to favor rapid shifts in average global temperature, depending on multiple kinds of feedback systems, not all of which were then identified (and still aren’t). Other alarming studies showed that carbon dioxide was not the only greenhouse gas we had to worry about, as methane and other trace gases might also make a significant contribution, and had to be included in the models to avoid their predictive failure. Antarctic ice cores also revealed that changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels went up and down together through past ice ages, which led scientists to conclude that our global atmosphere is highly dynamic and very modifiable–sort of like some  synapses in our brains.

1988 was an important year in the history of global climate study. It was an unusually hot year for the United States.  I remember that summer very well, as it was the year we moved from St. Louis to Minneapolis during heat spells that were uncharacteristic for the region and caused many well-established, older trees to die out. That was also the year in which U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was assembled, which, for the first time, formed a union between scientists and government representatives, whose function was to integrate scientific knowledge and help formulate public policy development to reduce greenhouse gases. The IPCC is the committee that shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore. The first report of the IPCC was made in 1990, in which the committee concluded that the planet had been warming in the recent past and future warming seemed likely. By 1995, the second report issued by the IPCC warned that serious warming would be likely in the coming century. Given that it was organized under the auspices of the United Nations, it is axiomatic that the Republican Party would be opposed to any information coming out of that committee. Fortunately, Al Gore formed an important relationship with the committee and helped to amplify their concerns with his popular documentary “An Inconvenient Truth.”

The hottest year on record, that of  1998, was associated with a “Super El Nino” which caused weather disasters and unrelenting heat. By the end of the 20th century, sophisticated computer models had been able to simulate global ice age climate changes and gain substantial credibility for their future climate projections. The third IPCC report in 2001 indicated that future global warming would bring the hottest period of the planet since the last ice age and may be attended with “severe surprises.” By then, the entire scientific community had agreed that greenhouse gases would likely be a serious problem and that the global reach of human societies needed to get busy to correct the excessive use of fossil fuels. A serious response was required of the major industrialized countries, but the U.S. has balked from entering into serious agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol.  This was followed by numerous observations on collapsing ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland that might cause sea levels to rise faster with far less predictably than previously thought. In many ways, it was beginning to look like we were facing a climate emergency.

The fourth IPCC report was issued in 2007 and argued that the cost of reducing emissions from fossil fuels would be offset by the benefits and savings of doing nothing to curb the further accumulation of greenhouse gases. In that year the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reached 382 ppm and the mean global temperature for a five year average was 14.5 degrees Centigrade (58 degrees Fahrenheit), the warmest in hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Some have argued that we are in a relative cooling period since 1998 because of reduced sunspot activity, but it’s unclear whether such activity  unambiguously affects our climate: if it does, then we are in for a sudden increase in global heating when sunspot activity resumes.

Global Climate Parameters vs IPCC projections

The main problem with the IPCC reports is that they take the arguments and data from scientists and water them down, for more palatable public consumption, hoping the issue appears less alarmist by making the issue less stressful, which in turn makes the issue seem less significant. Some scientists who serve on the IPCC have published papers challenging the overly conservative nature of the IPCC reports; the political arm of the IPCC gets the last word on the tone of the warnings and the details of the projections. One such objection to the IPCC reports was published by Rahmstorf et al, in Science, 2007 (volume 316, p 709–available to the public without a subscription to Science). The graph on the left was taken from the Rahmstorf et al paper (published on line); in the top section, the monthly carbon dioxide data measured from Mauna Loa Hawaii (blue) is compared to the IPCC projection (dashed line; note that the yearly levels of carbon dioxide fluctuate because of the annual change in vegetation and hence carbon dioxide absorption, largely in the northern hemisphere). The middle portion shows annual global mean land and ocean surface temperatures combined from two different sources (red and blue) together with their trends. The bottom panel shows the most discrepancy in the sea-level measurements based on tide gauges (annual, red) and from satellite altimeter (blue) data. When compared to the dashed line and gray range representing IPCC projections, it is primarily the sea-levels that show the greatest discrepancies between measurements and projections. That in short is the main worry.

At the present time, most of the expansion of the oceans has been attributed to thermal expansion, since the ocean is warmer, with an added dash of mountain glacier melting. To date, melting ice from the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland ice masses have added little to sea-level changes, but that picture could change dramatically in the coming decades. It is the sea-level discrepancy between measurements and the more conservative IPCC projections that stimulated Rahmstorf et al to publish a brief note in Science that brought more attention and focus on the politics of global climate projections within a body that is supposedly dedicated to a more complete and objective analysis.

We are now at a point in our understanding of the threat to global climate change, imposed by burning fossil fuels, that more science is not required. Yes, we will continue to refine our models, but by being forewarned, we should be forearmed and, as a global society, we should be sufficiently knowledgeable to act with a little long-term planning, as if we are facing a global emergency. We must recognize that our small blue planet, its oceans AND ITS CLIMATE are linked inseparably at the hip and that all three are being degraded by human activities. Ocean levels will rise and threaten coastal cities. The decrease in ocean salinity and pH could wipe out coral reefs, change the food chain in ways we cannot possibly comprehend and alter ocean currents which can dramatically change our weather.  Water resources will become more scarce in some regions and more abundant in others. If one removes natural vegetation, it will have an impact on the regional weather. Remove the trees in a region and you will have less rain; remove the plants and expose the soil and you invite desertification in some areas through more moisture evaporation imposed by the elevated temperatures. Additional moisture in the air will bring more floods and storms, but not in all regions. Some regions of the world may simply become unlivable, especially those where the climate is already dry and hot.  The Southwest region of the United States faces additional constraints on water and annual rainfall and regions of Africa are likely to become increasingly dry and more inhospitable. The global society in which we live, now numbering about 6 billion people are far more than the planet can tolerate if each society aspires to be like the us, as we continue to go about our business with an unlimited appetite for fossil fuels and forest depletion.   If anything, the rate of ice melting from the polar ice caps has been underestimated and modelers are madly revising their computer simulations to account for more dramatic events, such as entire ice shelves dropping into the ocean. It is probably asking too much for a model to accurately tell us where and when giant fluctuations in ocean levels are likely to originate.

I think that Obama’s nation-wide address this past week was about right, despite its downplay in the press. We need to interpret the catastrophic Gulf oil spill to 1) recognize that giant oil companies are completely indifferent to the environment and are acting solely through a profit motive (no surprise here and let’s give Obama credit for establishing the $20 billion BP compensation fund and the elimination of the annual BP dividend to stockholders–this was using the bully pulpit with great aplomb and a sensible outcome) and 2) if we had started on a more conservative use of fossil fuels, with an objective of reducing levels of carbon dioxide emissions just ten years ago, when GW Bush came into office, at a time when the need felt more acute, we would not need the oil that is gushing out of a giant hole a mile beneath the surface of the Gulf.  So, if we start immediately on the same quest, the next ocean oil gusher, whether in the Gulf of Mexico or the Arctic seas, will never occur, because that oil will not be required. Surely, with the Gulf oil spill, we are witnessing a source of oil that might be better left under the ocean floor. We should work towards the end of leaving some oil in the ground.

As Obama has pleaded with us to change our orientation about the use of fossil fuels, its an open question whether we will view this catastrophic Gulf oil spill to finally act and reduce our dependency on fossil fuels. There are several things we could do to give ourselves a dramatic boost in reducing our fossil fuel habit. Energy conservation and the development of fossil fuel alternatives is currently at a very primitive stage of development and needs dramatic new funding to alter its present course. One thing we must do is learn how to tax oil usage, eliminate subsidies to oil companies and come up with accurate accounts of what the true cost of oil is today, when you consider that a good part of our military is devoted to protecting our sources of oil, and in the process our military uses huge quantities of oil to run our ships and planes.  So, Mr. Obama, help us arrive at a figure for the cost of gasoline at the pump, computed by adding up the cost of subsidies, correction for the cheap bargain-basement oil leases, add the cost of military protection of the sea lanes and our occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and the then give us the future cost of gasoline, imposed by the expense of relocating major coastal cities to higher ground as a result of sea changes that are at present unknowable, but certainly on the way. Add to that the cost of this single Gulf oil spill and then try to calculate the financial impact it has had on the entire Gulf economy and the availability of Gulf seafood for the entire nation.  I don’t myself have this number at the moment, but it should not be difficult to estimate with ballpark numbers and would have been a powerful additive to Obama’s national speech on energy, especially if approached honestly and with full and complete disclosure.  We should all be concerned about this number and have a national discussion on what it means and how it should be used to motivate changes in our future.

The barn door has closed on avoiding global climate warming–it’s here today. But, there is still time to alter the slope or the rate of these changes and that should be a matter of concern for all of humanity, rich and poor,  but most critically, it should deeply concern the citizens of the United States of America, as we are the biggest offender and historically the most insensitive nation in facing what should be a moral imperative. If we do not act with intelligence and dedication to this task, we can be certain that the rest of the world will go along with our own indifference on the subject. Never before has a single issue of global significance rested so squarely on the shoulders of the worst offender in the history of humanity. We are not only in a position to act, but we need to change our habits and consumption of fossil fuel so that we discourage the rest of the world from trying to emulate our fossil fuel gluttony. The globe cannot afford to have China grow up to look just as modern and fuel-consuming as the United States, but that is just where we are headed. Beijing adds 1000 cars a day to an already heavily congested street and highway layout. In 2030, not so far away, China will need and use the equivalent of Europe’s entire energy consumption. They will achieve this by investing $3.7trillion in energy over the next twenty-five years. The Global energy supply has never looked as small as it does today. Should the condition of global “peak” oil confront us, as it has in several countries, including the United States, then expansion of the kind that China is planning will be virtually impossible.

RFM

Red Knot Shorebird

Perhaps we need another century or two to understand the species of the world and their inter-dependencies before we make judgments about who should go and who should stay: say goodbye to one and you may have to do the same for a seemingly diverse group of animals for reasons that are highly counter-intuitive. It’s foolish of course to even suggest that we are in a position to make decisions about species survival, because we aren’t knowingly making those judgments, even though events, such as species extinction, are very likely occurring on a regular basis as a result of human interventionism. But, species extinctions are taking place without our knowledge of the cause or even, in most cases, an understanding of the species involved. We keep track of big animals, like lions, tigers, elephants and other large mammals and, though  the future for them is not looking particularly bright, we are completely ignorant about animals a step or two below on the evolutionary ladder–like the now extinct, Gastric-Brooding Frog. Who said goodbye to that species? But, here’s one to ponder for the short-term: are you kidding me?–shorebirds and horseshoe crabs? This survival dynamic may play itself out over the next few years.

The interconnectedness of nature almost dictates that you don’t lose single species, that in in losing one, some other species or fauna will also be put into harm’s way:  the loss of one species may precipitate the loss of one or more others, largely because we are unaware of the biological forces that unite them. I don’t know who else we lost or which other species might have been changed when the Gastric-Brooding Frog disappeared, but it didn’t disappear without impacting other species. Of that we can be certain. But, what connection for example does the continued vitality of the horseshoe crab, Limulus polyphemus, an ancient marine arthropod, have with survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shore bird that makes an annual stopover in the region in which the horseshoe crab breeds? The Limulus is virtually unchanged since it first appeared in the Paleozoic, 570-248 million years ago. Though most people have barely heard of the Limulus, anyone who studies vision is well versed with this species, as its compound eye was first used by H.K. Hartline to reveal fundamental mechanisms of visual physiology, for which he went on to win a Nobel Prize in 1967 for his pioneering work. Horseshoe crabs are abundant on the shoreline of Woods Hole Massachusetts, where Hartline did much of his early work. One of Hartline’s students, Robert Barlow, went on to show that the male Limulus uses its eyes to search aggressively for females and looks for the outlines of the carapace as a visual cue for finding a suitable female, at a time when the animals come into the shoreline for laying and fertilizing their eggs, an activity that usually takes place at night. But, who would ever have thought that the seasonal breeding of this ancient marine species, which takes place big time in Delaware Bay on the East coast, would have a dramatic impact on the survival of the Red Knot bird, a migratory shorebird that flies 20,000 miles each year, from South America to the Arctic, where it breeds, and then flies back again. Surely the biologists got this one wrong!

The Red Knot arrives in Delaware Bay just at the time the Limulus has come near the shore for breeding and egg laying. Eggs are laid by the female in the sand and then fertilized externally by the male or males that surround her. It is the nourishment derived from feeding on the newly released Limulus eggs that provides a critically needed source of food for the Red Knot to regain its stamina and prepare for resuming its long journey North.  Once the Red Knots arrive at the Delaware shore, they only have about two weeks to get sufficient nourishment, rebuild their wing muscles and store fat for the flight ahead to their Arctic breeding grounds, where they lay their own eggs and raise their young over the short summer of the region. If  insufficient Limulus eggs are available, the Red Knot does not seem to have a plan B and may be ill-equipped to finish the long journey to the Arctic. In some regions where Red Knots used to breed in the Arctic, they have not been seen in recent years and insufficient Limulus egg nourishment has been regarded as the main deficiency in their failed migratory outcome. In preparation for the long flight from South America (Tierra del Fuego, in Chile/Argentina) the bird’s digestive system shuts down, such that the intermediate stop, to feed on Limulus eggs, provides the bird with a very digestible meal, rich in proteins–apparently the ideal food for building up muscle and fat for an animal with a reduced capacity digestive system. Despite the aggressive feeding of the Red Knot on Limulus eggs, the horseshoe crab population in the region was stable into the 1990s, when fishing with Limulus bait became popular.

The shortage of Limulus eggs seems to reflect an overly aggressive harvesting of animals, particularly gravid females used by fisherman as bait for catching eels and conch (marine snails): this has led to a significant decline in the number of Limulus eggs laid on the shoreline, down to perhaps 2/3 of previous estimates and the magnitude of this decline has been implicated in the reduced numbers of Red Knot birds making it to their Arctic breeding grounds. Indeed, it was the alarmingly fast reduction in the Red Knot population, by about 70%, that led to the discovery of their dependence on Limulus eggs in Delaware Bay.  The decline in Limulus breeding and egg-laying seems to be the tipping point that could wipe out the Red Knot and could do so very quickly if a better balance isn’t restored.   There is now a two-year moratorium on using Limulus for fishing bait in the region and researchers are busy trying to find artificial bait substitutes that could be used in place of the real thing. An excellent video about this species interdependency was shown recently on PBS and can be seen here.

How long this interconnectedness between a marine animal that is roughly 350 million years old and a bird, whose evolutionary record goes back 150 million years, is not a matter that can be resolved through the fossil record. At some point, the Red Knot’s migratory flight to Delaware Bay was initiated to be well-timed to the breeding season of the Limulus.  This synchrony could be seriously interrupted further by global climate change which might affect one or the other of these tightly timed mechanisms. Some biologists believe the Red Knot could be extinct within five years. At some point, you reach a bird density wherein birds can’t find one another to mate.

Limulus polyphemus

The fishing industry is not the only survival challenge that Limulus faces. The blood of  Limulus has been used for many years because of its unusual properties. Limulus blood is blue because it uses a copper protein as an oxygen carrier. But, of more importance is the fact that Limulus blood clots whenever it comes into contact with endotoxins. Extracts of Limulus blood have been used for decades to test for bacterial contamination. One quart of Limulus blood is valued at about $15,000. Currently, the FDA insists that all intravenously administered drugs should be exposed to a Limulus blood amebocyte lysate as a test for endotoxins. This is a significant improvement over the prior process of injecting a rabbit with the substance and then waiting to see if the animal gets sick and develops a fever!  The discovery of Limulus amebocyte lysate also took place at Woods Hole, through the observations of scientist Fred Bang. This insight and its technological development has reduced the endotoxin analysis test from days to about 45 minutes. Instead of killing the horseshoe crabs and then bleeding them, the pharmaceutical industry harvests blood from live animals, who are then returned to their native habitat. Thus, some former fisherman, who used them for bait, now collect them for blood letting in a laboratory environment and then release them to the same location. Last year, 300,000 horseshoe crabs were bled and then released; about 13% do not survive this blood-letting procedure, which extracts about 2/3 of their blood.

The counter-intuitive interconnectedness of the Red Knot and the horseshoe crab could only be revealed by extensive field studies that involved capturing, tagging and measuring birds along the pathway of their extensive, almost incomprehensible, migratory flight pattern. These are dedicated scientists who share a passion for this bird and its preservation. Why a bird would exist under the harsh conditions of the Tierra del Fuego, near the Strait of Magellan, then fly to the even harsher climate of the Arctic for breeding and the early rearing of their young, before flying off again on another 10,000 mile trip, is well beyond our capacity to comprehend. Perhaps it got started before tectonic plates rearranged the land masses. The migratory pattern of North America by non-indigenous Homo sapiens was primarily East to West, which is a little easier to understand. In contrast to the rational, the Red Knot flight plan is not one that any of us would recommend to serve as the basis for a committed, routine lifestyle, unless it was one we recommended to our Republican friends. I can imagine Rush Limbaugh feeding on Limulus eggs in search of a new high. Let us hope that the Red Knot survives and the current iteration of the Republican Party goes the way of the Dodo bird as its major flight plan glides it  into extinction. There are many signs that such a glide pattern is already underway. We will undoubtedly hear more about each species in the coming years.

RFM

While the Obama administration does not have the same  “drill baby  drill” attitude of its predecessor, there are no environmentalists within the administration, at least none with the passion of a Teddy Roosevelt or a Stewartl Udall; historically, it seems that spending time in the wondrous U.S. West was essential training experience to acquire a protective attitude about the environment–the physical wonders that your eyes report to you.  The “I want to save this for my children and grand children syndrome,” is a mind state which you could acquire while seeing for the first time places like the Grand Canyon, Zion Canyon, Yosemite Park, Bryce Canyon, Yellowstone, or any of the other places that are included in our fabulous national park system. Those searing experiences, faced with our inherent tendency to exploit and destroy the natural environment or privatize it,  has historically served as the stimulus for environmentalism and site preservation. But, that was then and this is now. Today, whether it’s an oil spill or the threat of global climate change, we need a far more sophisticated and knowledgeable plan that can begin to sort out the   “species interconnectedness;” this will require more knowledge of biology and environmental preservation, an emphasis which does not resonate well with the short-term problem solving that seemingly exists in the culture of the Obama cabinet meetings and our need for more oil resources. But, the biology we need to be studying can no longer be seen with the naked eye, for it is microscopic in size, yet fundamentally huge in its impact–it’s the ecosystem of our oceans and the threats that exist from oil spills, over fishing and salinity changes that might impair the fundamental biodiversity of the water and impact on the bottom of the food chain where life support is critical and the point at which it all begins.

So, how do you gain knowledge of species interconnectedness by watching birds drenched in oil and being treated with detergents? You don’t! Unless we are watching the event in the company of environmental and marine biologists and toxicologists. Yet, even these experts have limited knowledge of what the long-term impact of an oil spill will do to all the species in the ecosystem. Like global climate change, it’s too incomprehensible to imagine and, unlike global climate change, we don’t have computer models to help us figure out the real dangers of an oil spill of this magnitude. The historical reaction applies here: we can only shrug our shoulders and assume that eventually, all will be back to normal, that the ocean can and will deal with this problem, fixing it in ways that we don’t yet understand. After all, there is an equilibrium to nature, even when faced with increasing global temperatures or a slippery oily interface. We may not like the new steady-state, and it may be far less compatible with our expectations from the oceans of the world, but a new equilibrium point will be established and so far, we have shown ourselves to be completely impotent to facilitate one outcome over another. Ocean ecology is perhaps evolving in something less than a geological time scale. Something short enough that we will be able to gauge some of the impact of the Gulf oil spill, but we will be unable to do anything about it. By the time we recognize what happened, and a validate that a new balance point has been established, we will not be able to return to the old one, no matter how much we miss it, or what we do to restore it. New counter forces will be in place to preserve the new point of equilibrium and oppose any efforts we make to restore an older point of balance.

Krill are tiny crustaceans found in all oceans. They feed on phytoplankton and serve as one of the essential elements at the bottom of the food chain. Somehow we expect that these essential organisms will be unaffected and that no large mammals will start washing up on shore because of starvation. Should that ever begin to happen, the human population would of course already be stressed, yet probably  knowledgeable about the unfavorable imbalances within our oceans and its implications for planetary balance. What do we really know about the influence of oil on the ecology of a region? Did we lose species in the Exxon Valdez oil spill or the one in Santa Barbara? In the case of the Exxon Valdez, the salmon and herring fishing industry in the region collapsed. Slowly the salmon came back, but the herring never returned. One mayor in the region committed suicide, apparently related to his despair over the oil spill and its impact on the local economy. Have we done enough studies to understand the changes in the ecosystem that invariably happen with a major oil spill? Each major spill is probably very unique, given the variance in species and habitat of the surrounding region and relative size of the ocean volume involved.  We know that for each spill, the lives of commercial fishermen will be permanently changed and their chances of getting a fair compensation for their lost livelihood is about zero, as it will take many years to resolve the impending issues and suits within our heavily biased court system, one that rewards and protects big business and allows lower income recipients of the calamity to serve as mere cannon fodder. According to some studies, significant oil residue remains in Prince Williams Sound where the Exxon Valdez spilled oil onto 1200 miles of beach, killing thousands of animals. In some areas, oil was three feet thick. Current estimates are that it will take decades more or even centuries more for the oil to fully dissipate from the region: Litigation against Exxon continues.

If you’re wondering about long-term damage liability, to compensate for lost jobs and continued clean up operations, here is what happened on that issue with Exxon (From Democracy Now): “In 1994, an Alaskan jury found Exxon responsible and ruled the company should pay $5 billion in punitive damages to some 33,000 plaintiffs. Exxon appealed. In 2006, the 9th US Circuit Court cut the award of punitive damages in half to $2.5 billion. Then, in a 5-to-3 ruling last June, the Supreme Court cut the amount of punitive damages again and ordered Exxon Mobil to pay just $500 million in punitive damages, one-tenth of the original jury’s ruling. That equates to about four days of Exxon Mobil’s net profits.” You can see how favorably the courts treat these jury-determined settlement costs. For Exxon, it’s just a few days of profits and they have more lawyers to throw at these issues than almost anyone else on the planet, unless it’s our own government that operates by bringing criminal charges.

This country is badly in need of re-implementing the Office of Technology Assessment (OTA) and staffing the organization with field and marine biologists who can participate in efforts to understand oil spills and the devastation they generate on species and their interconnectedness. I have commented on this acute need in a previous posting. We only see the damage at the top, on the shores, in the form of dead and oily birds, turtles and a few mammals. We don’t have the capacity to see the impact on the ecosystem beneath or the effects of the new menace–the large subsurface oil plumes riding at mid-level depths in the ocean; the oil companies would like to keep it that way. For them too much knowledge is a bad thing. They would like us to remember that the oil platforms they put down become havens for fish to collect in the service of sport fisherman. Isn’t that a good enough benefit?

The lack of a strong, passionate environmental presence sitting at the Obama cabinet meetings has made it difficult for our urban president to find his voice on the Gulf oil spill. Someone needs to drive home the environmental disaster to Obama in such a way that an urbanite, who seems to have learned nothing about species interdependency and the potentially disastrous magnitude of the BP spill, can quickly get up to speed talking about phytoplankton, krill and other members of the Zooplankton group. He very badly needs to go out on a boat with a group of marine biologists and toxicologists, who can explain to him the dimensions of the problem and how seeing a bunch of oily birds, while visibly shocking, coupled to the regular summary of the spill on CNN (mostly consumed by showing the undersea footage of the oil leak bulging out if the drill rupture), is nothing more than the tip of the iceberg for the local fishing economy and the long-term health of the Gulf ecosystem. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, a lawyer by training, doesn’t quite have the sophistication or experience to recruit the kind of scientific expertise and visibility required to assure the public that some level of scientific accumen is being applied to this disaster. In keeping with the corporate motif of the new world order, science and scientists don’t speak for BP, except through the corporate elites of the company, who know virtually nothing about biology; their objective is solely the public relations message and BP’s liability. Yet, biology is what this spill is all about and it is where the effort must be focused with education, research and a good dose of corporate honesty. School children in the region could be enlisted in the research effort to gather samples, make measurements, much like school children in Minnesota discovered and studied three-legged frogs. How refreshing it would be to see and hear the BP CEO tell us that BP has no idea what the long-term damage of this spill will do to the environment, but that they will begin to fund significant grants for the region to be studied as the long-term laboratory environment they helped to create.  At least that would be a starting point from which we could launch some serious research. Yet, we have to admit that the problem cannot be researched in the sense that no long-term projections can be made because we do not understand, nor do we have models for comprehending the impact we are witnessing from this spill. The new oil plumes beneath the surface represent a form of oil we have not encountered before and we don’t even know the cause. But, they potentially represent vast dead zones due to the lack of oxygen that has been reported near these sites.

Hurricane season is nearly underway and each day we experience continued oil gushing from the well, we run the risk of a single hurricane serving like an ocean Hobart machine, circulating and mixing the oil and water until it reaches the loop current and begins marching up the Atlantic coast. The city of Fort Lauderdale, a major oil import region, has begun discussions on the impact of Gulf oil that might find its way moving into the Atlantic coast, an event that could devastate the tourist economy of the region, to say nothing of the damage already done to the seafood industry that serves Florida and much of the country.

But, back to Alaska. If a spill should occur anything close to what we are seeing in the Gulf, once drilling in the Beaufort and and Chukchi seas begins, it will be impossible to devote anything significant to the cleanup operation, at least not for many months. Even Shell executives have agreed that “there is no good way to clean up oil from a spill in broken sea ice.” The government has acknowledged that a major spill in the Arctic waters of the area could have devastating consequences in the Arctic Ocean’s icy waters and could be difficult to clean up. How about impossible? However, they concluded that a large oil leak was “too remote and speculative an occurrence” to warrant analysis. Well that was then (December, 2009) and this is now. The permit for drilling in the Arctic sea has been suspended, but that suspension could be lifted soon enough to see drilling this summer. Should a spill occur in these cold waters, the nearest Coast Guard facility is a 1,000 miles away, the nearest cleanup vessels and equipment are too few and at least 100 miles away, and the nearest airport where major supplies could be transported is Seattle, a few thousand miles away.

The Alaska waters where drilling permits have been issued, are vastly colder than the Gulf and any oil spill will take far longer to dissipate, no matter what the mechanism, be it biochemical breakdown or micelle formation and dispersal. For another, during the winter, weather patterns often include 65 mile per hour winds at temperatures in the -40 degree range, making rescue operations for any troubled rig virtually impossible. In the summer, the area serves as a huge breeding center for multiple species of birds that migrate from six different continents, including all of the other 49 states. Huge herds of caribou congregate on the Arctic coastal plane and Beluga whales have their calving season in these waters. To become more familiar with the region, check out Subhankar Banerjee‘s interview on TomDispatch.

Several years ago, GW Bush wanted to open the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil and gas development. Fortunately, environmental organizations defeated this idea. But that took place when every environmental organization, everyone interested in sane ecological management, knew they had a hostile President to deal with and opposition to his leadership on almost every front was widespread and passionate. Today, in the current climate, with a Democratic President, the environmental movement has been much more subdued and has become more passive about the ocean drilling plans of Shell Oil in the Beaufort and Chukchi seas, particularly since Obama announced permits for that drilling operation a few weeks before the BP Gulf oil spill. Perhaps the Gulf oil spill will serve to re-invigorate the environmental opposition to drilling and help the country move rapidly to a state of reduced oil dependency. It is not clear to anyone that the drilling demands of the international oil giants is really necessary. You might want to read Michael Klare on this important topic. So far however, Obama has shown himself to be just as much of an oil man as we had with GW Bush. The Minerals Management Service, the government oversight function for the oil companies has for years been deeply corrupted. The recent shake-up in the government oversight structure may improve this relationship, but Obama has a lot of repair work to do if these oil companies are ever going to conform to the needs of our society, rather than their own needs of high profits and reckless drilling practices, with little financial risk to their bottom line. Maybe this will be his wake-up call for the environment and Big Oil.

RFM

The New York Times also has a multimedia site that is worth checking out; among other sources of information,  it has a history of major oil spills beginning with the oil well leak in 1969 off the coast of Santa Barbara. In that instance, prisoners were used as a major source of labor for the cleanup which employed tons of straw. But, how desperate are we for oil such that some wells in the gulf have been granted permits to drill beginning at more than 9,000 feet below the surface? Is this oil-drilling chutzpa or are we pursuing true needs? Oil companies fear that if they don’t feed the never ending growth of the expanding  global thirst for oil, consumers will turn to alternative fuels and sources of energy, dropping the price of oil and making these more risky oil adventures less cost-effective. But is that really true? How desperate are we for oil and how scarce are the sources, if we are now drilling at such deep sites, without having a more foolproof method for handling accidents.  This is an issue, in which the biggest oil-consuming country on the planet, namely us, can have a huge impact on our economy, the environment and the need for ever increasing oil supplies by adopting more sensible restraints on oil usage: the new federal standards for improved fuel economy will help, but other measures are needed to meet the demands in front of us for global climate change. The Copenhagen agreement seems too little too late, even though it’s better than nothing.
So far bp has been reluctant to have scientists make more definitive calculations of the magnitude of the oil spill, because this measurement will have a direct impact on the financial liability of the company.  A government report on the spill magnitude, compiled by several different agencies,  is due out this week. In the meantime bp is sticking to 5,000 barrels a day, but other estimates, based on seeing the films of the oil leak, go as high as 70,000 barrels/day. Bp refers to these higher estimates as alarmist!

RFM

In the aftermath of  WW II, Anglo Iranian Oil had assumed the dominant position in Iran’s oil production and had constructed a huge refinery at Abadan.  Ironically, the seeds of nationalism had been sewn by Americans, both by the speeches of FDR and the fact that Americans who were present in Iran at that time, were mostly doctors and aid people, such that America’s image at that moment, in the early 1950s,  was one of a prosperous, do-good country, unlike anything Iranians had come to expect, based on their experience with the British (British colonialism in Iran meant that they did not train Iranians on how to make things work, like their giant refinery in Abadan. So when the British were forced out of Iran when the company was first nationalized by Mossadegh, they were able to shut down the refinery, further alienating Iranians).  Another source of outrage by Iranians against Anglo Iranian Oil came in 1950, when the Arab American Oil company, operating in Saudi Arabia, had agreed, under threat of nationalization, to share the profits with the Saudis on a 50/50 basis. The British however, were adamantly against such an agreement with the Iranians.

To understand BP and its tortured history with Iran, you might want to read Steven Kinzer’s book All the Shah’s Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror, which tells the unfortunate history of Iran’s march to Democracy and how America, by supporting the demands of Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), betrayed democracy and sided with oil and profiteering, with a little anti-communist rhetoric thrown in to confuse the issue.  Kinzer was recently interviewed on Democracy Now where he summarizes this well-known history. Toppling Mossadegh in turn led to the Iranian hostage crisis under Carter, the election of Ronald Reagan (perhaps with the aid of the  “October Surprise”) and the theocratic dictatorship that exists in Iran today. Kinzer extends his analysis to include the Russian invasion of Afghanistan, the rise of the Taliban and the American sponsorship of Iraq in their war against Iran (for whom we supplied intelligence and the helicopters that Saddam used to gas the Kurds). That single act of toppling Iran’s Democracy through a CIA coup, seems to pervasively wind its way through much of our history, including the events of 9/11.  New York Times writer James Risen also has a good piece available on this period in history, when the CIA turned to the dark side and permanently transformed what had been a good relationship between the democratically-elected Prime Minister (Mossadegh), the Iranian people and the American presence in Iran. The NYT also has a general website on the overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian government by the CIA serving British interests, where you can stroll through different sections of the unfortunate American participation. The American model developed in Iran, would serve for countless other, future CIA strategies to overthrow uncooperative or democratically elected governments, especially those in South America.

When Eisenhower was elected, we caste our lot with Anglo Iranian Oil and British interests. At the Times site, you can see the pictures of the players in this drama by scanning over the images to get their names. After the coup that deposed Mossadegh, we installed the Shah, whose torture and suppressive techniques administered through his SAVAK organization eventually led to the revolution in 1979 and the fractionated relationship we have with Iran today–a festering wound we refuse to allow to heal.

If we could go back and reverse one single step in the development of our policies in the Middle East, deposing Mossadegh and stamping out Democracy in Iran would get my vote as the one event we got completely wrong (not that we did very much right, as we continuously sided with oil interests against the rising tides of nationalism). We initiated the CIA coup that overthrew Mossadegh solely because Churchill requested it (by all accounts, Mossadegh was an exceptional leader, perhaps the best and brightest of the good men in the Middle East in those years–he was well-educated and committed to representative government; he was Man of the Year for Time Magazine in 1951 and hugely popular with the people of Iran; if he had a flaw, it was his inflexibility in dealing with BP) . Churchill was unable to get Truman to eliminate Mossadegh and preserve the interests of BP. However, once Eisenhower was elected, he agreed (largely because his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, wanted international companies to have unfettered access to the countries they operated in and he could always find communists even when there weren’t any); Dulles sent in the CIA, under the leadership of Kermit Roosevelt, who pulled the trigger and deposed Mossadegh. Today, we do not have a problem identifying our own nationalism: indeed, if anything, we seem to wallow in it, but we find it almost impossible to adequately recognize the nationalism of people  from other countries, particularly if we need something from that country. Somehow, we manage to convince the world that we are the only ones entitled to nationalism: everyone else’s nationalism has to get out of the way.  With us nationalism is  viral. Nevertheless, with the Shah installed in power after the coup against Mossadegh, Anglo Iranian Oil could not resume its previous position. There was too much national distrust of the oil company, which eventually changed its name to British Petroleum and initially had a 40% hold on the new oil consortium named the National Iranian Oil Company.

A question you’re all dying to ask is surely this: is the current Gulf oil spill somehow related to our meddling in the internal affairs of Iran in 1953? Preposterous? Maybe, but then again maybe not.  Was the toppling of Mossadegh, carried out through the CIA to protect the interests of BP, the non-verbal license for BP to acquire its swashbuckling attitude that allows the company to ignore safety issues and acquire a sense of swagger with confidence that brought them through the twentieth century into the twenty first and into the Gulf of Mexico, where they are now responsible for what could be the most environmentally destructive accident since the industrial revolution began? The most recent estimates suggest that the amount of oil being added to the Gulf is between 25,000 and 70,00 barrels or more a day, or roughly an Exxon-Valdez oil spill every few days. If we had allowed Mossadegh to nationalize Anglo Iranian Oil (BP), would we have a giant catastrophe spewing forth in the Gulf a mile beneath the surface of the water?  BP is the fourth largest corporation in the world and the largest in Britain. My own thinking is that if you can manipulate two powerful governments to do your bidding, as the British and Americans did to save BP from nationalization, then you, as a company are more likely to emerge from that experience with an unparalleled sense of corporate swagger that encourages disregard for the rules and laws passed by either of those governments, especially the two that you just outwitted. This might be one reason why BP is America’s largest oil supplier. If you’re a BP cowboy, after Mossadegh’s topple, you can keep your boots and spurs on as you walk down main street! The long threads of this interconnectedness seem too tempting to avoid sewing them into whole cloth, such that there is at least a tilt towards corporate arrogance. Or is it the fact that we just finished eight years of a presidency that encouraged and indeed insisted on oil company arrogance for now and into the future?  Maybe it’s not such a stretch to the imagination to see these connections and then wonder what kind of oil companies we are going to need if we ever get off of our dependence on black gold? It does not seem like BP is the model for the kind of oil company we need in the future. Indeed, it would have been so much better if we had allowed Mossadegh to stay and BP to go. After all nationalizing oil companies should help remove the two edged sword between cutting costs by reducing emphasis on safety standards and ruining the environment. The BP Gulf oil spill could be the tip of a new iceberg, as plans have been laid out to drill far deeper wells into the Gulf, as the technology for drilling advances, while the technology for protecting the environment doesn’t exist.

RFM

RFM